Gilbert's Pharmacy has clear values, a commitment to patient care, and managers who genuinely care about their teams. What was missing was a structured way to translate that culture into productive coaching conversations.

Without formal training on performance coaching, managers were heading into reviews without a shared framework. That creates inconsistency. When there's no model to follow, it's easy for coaching to feel uncomfortable or vague, especially when a performance issue is involved. This causing employees to feel a lack of support. 

The goal was to change that: give Gilbert's managers a practical, repeatable tool — the GROW Coaching Model — and make sure it felt native to Gilbert's values.

I knew the content needed to do more than inform,  it needed to build real coaching capability. So instead of organizing the course around topics, I structured it around Bloom's Taxonomy, deliberately moving learners up the cognitive ladder from recognition to judgment.

→ Remember: Gilbert's Core Values and their connection to coaching

→ Understand: The purpose and four stages of GROW

→ Apply: Practice strategic questions through real branching conversations

→ Analyze: Dig into the root causes of a performance challenge with Ryan

→ Evaluate: One final coaching conversation — all four stages, feedback included

The objectives stop at Evaluate, this is intentional. This course is designed for pharmacy managers learning to coach, not to design coaching models from scratch. Every objective serves the performance goal. To make the learning stick, I leaned hard into interactivity. Passive content doesn't build coaching skills — practice does.

The Process

After reviewing the brief and digging into Gilbert’s source materials — the Core Values document and the GROW Coaching Guide — two things stood out. First, the coaching model couldn’t stay theoretical; managers needed to see it in a scenario that felt real to their day-to-day. Second, Gilbert’s values weren’t just supporting content — they were the thread that made this course feel specific, not generic.

Those insights shaped the direction from the start. I began by mapping out the course structure with a mind map.

Each scenario is structured as a linear progression with branching at every decision point. At each node, the learner is presented with two to three response options — all of which are plausible things a real manager might say. This is a deliberate design choice: the distractors are not obviously wrong. Options like "That's a great idea! Let's go with that" or "So the issue is just time management then" reflect common manager instincts that sound reasonable but undermine effective coaching.

The branching works as follows:

Correct path — the learner selects the most effective coaching response and advances to the next beat in the conversation

Incorrect path — the learner is redirected through a feedback node that explains why the choice missed the mark, then returned to the same decision point to try again

This retry mechanic is intentional. Rather than penalizing learners for wrong answers or moving them forward regardless, the design treats every mistake as a teachable moment. Learners cannot progress until they make the right call — which reinforces the correct behavior without creating a dead end.

One of the core design decisions was to embed Gilbert's Pharmacy values — Putting Patients First, Creating a Clean, Welcoming Environment, and Delivering Efficient Visits & Accurate Scripts — directly into the feedback layer rather than treating them as a separate compliance element.

Each feedback node that addresses a coaching misstep or success ties the consequence back to at least one of the three values. For example: Dismissing Ryan's idea in the Options stage triggers feedback referencing Clean, Welcoming Environment — because psychological safety is part of what a welcoming environment means for a team, not just for patients

For this project, I built an interactive GROW Coaching prototype in Mindsmith that drops learners straight into Ryan’s world — a pharmacist navigating peak-hour chaos, backed-up scripts, and patients who deserve better. From there, learners move through each stage of the GROW framework using a mix of tabbed interactions, hotspots, and branching dialogue scenarios.

The most complex piece is the branching scenarios, where learners step into the role of Ryan’s manager and make real coaching decisions at each stage. Instead of generic “try again” prompts, they receive specific feedback explaining what went wrong and why, then loop back to apply it — keeping the experience constructive without feeling punitive.

A standout moment comes during the summative assessment, where learners answer a call from a customer, Hannah. The conversation shifts based on their response, turning feedback into something immediate and human.

Learners also explore Gilbert’s Values through a hotspot interaction layered onto a real pharmacy image, creating a more discovery-driven experience. Throughout the course, each GROW stage uses tabbed panels to keep coaching tips clear, focused, and easy to navigate at their own pace.

Alongside the course, I designed a G.R.O.W Reference Cheat Sheet as a job aid learners could take away and actually use on the floor. The idea was simple, after finishing the course, managers shouldn't have to go back through the whole thing just to remember a good coaching question. They needed something they could pull up quickly in the middle of a shift.

The cheat sheet is laid out around the four GROW stages — Goal, Reality, Options, Will — and for each stage it pairs three coaching questions directly with the Gilbert's value it connects to. So it's not just a list of questions. It's a reminder of why each question matters in the context of Gilbert's specifically.